Two Fellowships Together

Tonight our Oddfellows youth group combined with the Living Water youth group from our sister church in the city. This has become an annual occasion since we got together two years ago. I missed last year's one since it took place down in Christchurch. I'm glad I was up in Auckland this time!

My brothers and I got there just on time since we had to buy supper (the people who usually buy supper *cough* Rebecca!*cough* couldn't make it), and we were surprised at just how tall the guys from the other fellowship were, and how many of them there were! They definitely outnumbered us, since the number of females in our youth group were a little low.

We started off with a bit of singing. This year it was the city church's turn to lead singing and our turn to run the games. They lead three songs, and it was pretty good and meaningful. They sing songs a lot faster than we do!

For the last song we were all asked to stand up together and sing before Gabrielle, one of our youth group leaders started the games.

The first game was to sort ourselves out into alphabetical order based on the first letter of our name. It took a while to get that done! We then called out our names for everyone to hear.

Gabrielle then gave us each three clothes-pins and told us the two banned words for the night were

'No' and 'Know'


If we said either of those words, we had to give one of our clothes-pins to the person who made us say it. It wasn't long till I had to hand over one of mine to Carmen!

We all then headed into the gym where we played a game our youth group played on the very first youth group. Two teams sit opposite side a sheet. One person from each team come up to the sheet and as soon as it drops, both people have to try call out the name of the person facing them and whoever does so first wins. For the first few times people from the same youth group faced each other so there wasn't much getting-to-know-the-other-youth-group going on! One team eventually realised they could see the other team's reflection in the window so we had to cover it up!

The two teams were then asked to split into four teams. One team was predominantly made up of Oddfellows and maybe one Living Water person, while one team only had one Oddfellow (poor Joylynn!) and one team had no Oddfellows! I decided I'd go it alone and join that team! I almost managed to memorise all of their names but in the process lost another one of my clothes-pins!

The next game involved each team having to send one person to touch Jireh as fast as they could based on the attribute Gabrielle called out, e.g. if she called out someone who has a grandparent who can speak English, then whoever fit that criteria had to try run to Jireh (who was standing in the middle) and touch him to earn points for the team. I only ran twice - 'someone who can play more than three musical instruments' and 'someone who's been in a production'. I didn't win the second one though! Some of the kiwi guys in the other fellowship were quite dedicated, diving to touch Jireh first!

We then played a game of Chinese whispers, only drawing on people's backs. There were many funny drawings of cats (one ended up being a vase!), trees and boats! The best were probably the boats as the drawers caught on to what the picture was supposed to be and just jazzed it up!

The final game involved each team sending one person to sit up in front. They were each assigned a celebrity (they weren't told who they were) and took turns to ask yes/no questions as to who they were, in order to be the first to figure it out.

The first round involved celebrities, with Cleo figuring out that she was President Obama first (key question: am I black?), followed by Claire who correctly guessed she was Jet Li, then our team's representative Tiana guessing she was Beethoven (she went from completely lost to correctly guessing!) and then the final guy Jed realised he was Kate Middleton.

The second round was a little longer and more complicated as each person was a fruit. Our team representative correctly guessed that he was a boysenberry, while the second person to correctly guess he was a rockmelon cleverly started asking whether there were 3 letters, 4 letters, 5 letters.... Poor Eva was the last to guess she was a mango!

We finished the night with a big group photo before we had supper and some of the guys from the other fellowship played basketball with some other people from our church. The Oddfellows vs Living Water Fellowship basketball challenge didn't eventuate. I don't know why, maybe we got intimidated by just how tall they all were!

Some of the people I had talked to from the other fellowship were keen on getting together again sometime this year, so hopefully we do it again more than once this year!